Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology
00:01:28 · Shah Ramezani
[00:01:28] S1: Hey, guys. Good to be on the podcast. Excited to meet you all. Maybe I need quick introductions. I'm Shah. I started the company almost five years ago. The initial vision was we want to do something with blockchain and cryptocurrencies. At the time, it was very unclear what the real world use cases were. But I was very convinced that under the hood there is going to be real applications. And for me, it was very clear that payments is going to be the first one that actually will find a user adoption and have like a scale adoption for blockchains. And around like three years ago, saw in that stablecoins. We realized stablecoin has the power to really make money move this way the Internet does. As you can imagine, everything's moving faster even with the age of AI. Like you can't wait anymore like a day for your payments and it can't be clunky. So we saw that stable had the fertile ground to actually be a technology. So we decided to be the infrastructure layer as that was the easiest way for us to actually get that solution out of the door and make everyone adopted and basically move to a new standard. That's kind of like how everything started.
00:02:24 · Hector Mason
[00:02:24] S2: It's awesome. We're gonna tap into a lot of different areas of the business and also what sort of future holds. So that period, that initial period, I think you had like this amazing, amazing growth, which just put so much pressure on a founder and particularly for inexperienced founders. You know, a lot of first time founders would find the organization kind of splitting at the scenes. They're hiring too quickly. They lower the bar for hires. It just... This hiring part becomes a huge constraint. Like, how have you felt during that period of really fast growth? Like, what were the key pressures that you were feeling?
00:02:53 · Shah Ramezani, Hector Mason
[00:02:53] S1: Yeah. I would say we never reduced the hiring bar, but then we had issues finding people. So we're going through a pain of, like, not having enough people and not having the right roles filled. And whilst the business was growing, customer demands were growing and support tickets were growing, we didn't have the right people to address it. That was a very painful period of time, but we just didn't want to compromise on that hiring bar. I think hiring we're very obsessed about it, right? I think I'm a firm believer that having the right person, like the absolute right person versus maybe the okay person or like that's okay. You can get it. It's like a massive difference. You know, it's like a massive difference in outcome for you as a company. And given that we have so many things to do and we're very ambitious as a company and we have a lot of things we've to do, we are very obsessed about finding the best people because that's where we see the biggest outcome. So it's been very challenging. We're addressing it from a number of points like we have our own internal talent team. We're building that out. I think that's very important from the get go that not only rely on recruiters, but also at the same time, we contract recruiters selectively where we think they are actually very good at what they're doing. But, yeah, that's kind of like how we think about it. So I was just like my number one role is getting the right people into the company. [00:03:56] S2: Are you still involved in every hire?
00:03:56 · Hector Mason, Shah Ramezani, James Pringle
[00:03:56] S2: Are you still involved in every hire? [00:03:57] S1: Involved not in every hire, but I'm involved in making sure the funnel is stacked. I'm involved in making sure the approach is right, the process is right. I'm involved in some... Many of them, but, like, some of them, I just trust my team. I have a senior team that I trust very well. I think they think the way I would do and the approach things that as I I trust them fully, so I don't need to interview them as well. [00:04:15] S0: What number higher for you was your first internal recruiter? [00:04:19] S1: How big we were? We were like 20 already had internal recruitment. Yeah. Already at 20. I think it's very underrated. A recruitment company will obviously never care as much as you do as a company. I mean, of course, they care because of the relationship. They wanna make sure you're happy, but they will make sure that you transact and they will make the fees. So the incentives are not 100% aligned, whereas with your own talent team, it's much more aligned. Like, we try to go deep. We try to understand the best people at every company. We try to meet people early, not even just like just to get them hired, just to meet them, talk to them. Some of them we talk to them today and then we hire them next year. So we really try to take it more like a long term approach here in regards to talent. [00:04:55] S0: And what is it that you're actually looking for?
00:04:55 · James Pringle, Shah Ramezani
[00:04:55] S0: And what is it that you're actually looking for? [00:04:57] S1: Well, it's hard to say. I mean, first of all, there are these core values. Right? First of all, like, I think very important, like, strong values, good people, like, very open mind. I don't need to read all of them, but I think it's very obvious. Like, we don't wanna make a compromise on people's values. Think it's very important for us because that makes a team work better. But then it needs to have that strong drive, extreme drive, almost like a spark. But again, that spark doesn't show with every people the same way. You know, like I think someone like very introverted, you can't see that in the interview. That is one that you want to see that drive. But then you also want to understand for the role required, how is the brain wired? Does it require an autistic person? Does it require like an extrovert? Like you have to understand how they work and why and what drives them. So I think in between all of that, make a decision. But I think values are important. Ambition is important because if they are on ambition, you can't make them go through a lot of difficult time because they don't know why they should do it. So... Yeah. And then I guess feel well in team composition, low ego, but that comes all with good values then.
00:04:57 · Shah Ramezani, Hector Mason
[00:04:57] S1: Well, it's hard to say. I mean, first of all, there are these core values. Right? First of all, like, I think very important, like, strong values, good people, like, very open mind. I don't need to read all of them, but I think it's very obvious. Like, we don't wanna make a compromise on people's values. Think it's very important for us because that makes a team work better. But then it needs to have that strong drive, extreme drive, almost like a spark. But again, that spark doesn't show with every people the same way. You know, like I think someone like very introverted, you can't see that in the interview. That is one that you want to see that drive. But then you also want to understand for the role required, how is the brain wired? Does it require an autistic person? Does it require like an extrovert? Like you have to understand how they work and why and what drives them. So I think in between all of that, make a decision. But I think values are important. Ambition is important because if they are on ambition, you can't make them go through a lot of difficult time because they don't know why they should do it. So... Yeah. And then I guess feel well in team composition, low ego, but that comes all with good values then. [00:05:52] S2: So I'm really curious about what you said around, do we go for, like, an extroverted or an autistic person? Because there are two buckets. There's some overlap. But what what would be examples of roles where, you know, sometimes an extra... An autistic person is great, but, you know,